Curated by DaManuel Richardson and Solomon Turner, the screening series New Black Wave showcases films by Black filmmakers who push cinema’s conceptual and aesthetic boundaries to explore deep-rooted emotions within the African diaspora.
VOL. 2
Back for its second edition, the films in New Black Wave, Vol. 2 remix public and personal archives to reveal new meanings within familiar images of Black life in America. We bear witness to the absolute and overwhelming freedom exhibited in Black expression and the ever-present power of Black culture.
Screenings in Los Angeles and San Fransisco co-presented by Canyon Cinema, LA Filmforum, and the California African American Museum
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i ran from it and was still in it
Darol Olu Kae / USA, 2020, digital, 11 min.
A poetic meditation on familial loss and separation, and the love that endures against dispersion.
Darol Olu Kae, (b. 1984). Artist and filmmaker from and based in Los Angeles. Kae’s artistic practice disrupts conventional narrative structures of storytelling through its dynamic treatment of sound and image. His collaborative, research-based approach to art and filmmaking grounds itself in the precarious, yet generative power of the black experience in America. Kae has collaborated with visionary filmmakers such as Kahlil Joseph and A.G. Rojas. And his own film work has screened at festivals and institutions worldwide including BlackStar Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, MoCA Los Angeles, and Sundance Film Festival. He was awarded the Pardino d’oro for Best International Short Film in 2020 at the Locarno Film Festival for his film i ran from it and was still in it. And in 2021, i ran from it… earned Special Jury Recognition for Poetry at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival. Kae is currently in pre-production for his next short-form project, Keeping Time, and developing his feature directorial debut, Without a Song.
10:28,30
Paige Taul / USA, 2019, digital, 5 min., Los Angeles Premiere
As a part of the larger constellations of works concerning familial relationships, 10:28,30 examines the relationship between myself and my sister, and our relationship to our mother. I am interested in the dissonance of our lives apart and the tension in the desire to be together.
Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently resides in Chicago, IL.
An Ecstatic Experience
Ja'Tovia Gary / USA, 2015, digital, 7 min.
A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.
Ja’Tovia Monique Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across film, video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary aims to destabilize notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity in films and installations that serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black sociality, familial bonds, the interiority of Black women and femmes, and the global efforts towards liberation often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. The artist has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, the Schomburg Center, Anthology Film Archives, Locarno Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Centre Pompidou, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, among others. Gary has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, and Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
For Our Girls
Michèle Stephenson & Imani Dennison / USA, 2020, digital, 10 min., Los Angeles Premiere
The film is a love letter to Black daughters — acknowledging the sacred, and at times, tense relationship mothers and daughters share as they face challenges and accept each other’s flaws.
Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces. She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that are created by, for and about communities of color and the Black diaspora. Her stories intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systems of oppression. Stephenson draws on fiction, immersive and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives. Her feature documentary, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. Her more recent feature documentary, Stateless, was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Stephenson also collaborated as co-director on the magical realist virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror, The Changing Same, which was recently nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Along with her writing partners, Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book, Promises Kept. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow and a Creative Capital Artist.
Imani Dennison, she/they, is an experimental documentary filmmaker and DP based in Brooklyn, NY. Imani graduated from Howard University where she studied Political Science and Photography. Imani’s work interrogates stories of Black people in the South and the African diaspora, usually centered in folklore, fantasy, and oral histories. Imani’s most recent film, They Say The People Can Skate, is a documentary told through the reminiscence and reflection of Black Louisvillian’s recollection of roller skating culture in Louisville, KY. Imani Co-Directed For Our Girls, a love letter to Black daughters — acknowledging the sacred, and at times, tense relationship mothers and daughters share as they face challenges and accept each other’s flaws which went on to receive major distribution in the U.S. Imani has created commissioned documentary works for PBS, Black Tag, ITVS, and For Africans. Imani’s first film, Garden of Eden, premiered at The Cannes Film Festival in 2016. Imani is head Curator and Programmer at Black Science Fiction, a creative collective invested in the future, liberation, and pleasure of Black and brown folx. Black Science Fiction hosts community workshops, live music experiences and film screenings.
$75,000
Moïse Togo / France/Mali, 2020, digital, 14 min., Los Angeles Premiere
A look at the biological aspect of albinism, which is a genetic and hereditary condition that affects not only the pigmentation of sufferers but also, and above all, their physical and mental health. These people are victims of discrimination, mutilation, and ritual crimes in Africa.
Moïse Togo was born in Mopti, Mali, in 1990. He studied at the local university’s department of law and political science before attending the conservatory in the capital, Bamako. There he graduated with a master's degree in multimedia arts. He is a recipient of the Bakary Diallo Prize and a fellow at Le Fresnoy – National Studio of the Contemporary Arts. His short film, $75,000, premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2021 and went on to screen at other festivals, including Annecy International Animation Festival (2021) and Sundance Film Festival (2022).
Standing at the Scratching Line
Julie Dash / USA, 2016, digital, 11 min.
Traveling between Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mother Bethel AME in Philadelphia, Julie Dash creates a cinematic tone poem about returning to sacred spaces of departure and arrival.
Thirty-one years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust. She became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. Dash recently designed two rooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and VOGUE, In American: An Anthology of Fashion, featured at the NYC Met Gala 2022. She directed Kerry Washington’s upcoming new drama series Reasonable Doubt. Dash is known for having directed multiple episodes of the award-winning drama series, Queen Sugar, Season 2, created and produced by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, for OWN Television. Her most recent museum installations include Standing at The Scratch Line, at the Philadelphia Museum of African American History, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Shine a Light, a large-scale video mapping projection for the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit. Dash has several documentary projects in the works, including Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, a feature-length documentary in-progress about Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a world-renowned author, performer, and chef from rural South Carolina. She earned an MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, an MFA in Theater Arts (Film & Television Production) at UCLA; and she received a BA in Film Production from CCNY. Julie Dash is a Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.
BLACK TO TECHNO
Jenn Nkiru / United Kingdom, 2019, digital, 21 min.
BLACK TO TECHNO is a music documentary charting the anthropological, socio-economical, geopolitical roots of techno from Detroit and how it traveled and translated into becoming the soundtrack to fall of the wall in Berlin.
Jenn Nkiru is an award-winning visionary artist and director from London. The relationship between the spiritual, visual, sonic, somatic, music and movement, are central concerns of her work in how they intersect and work together to expand the possibilities of film language. Pushed through a surrealist lens, her works are grounded in the history of black music, afro-surrealism, the aesthetics of experimental film, international art cinema, the black arts movement and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form. She has steadily created a collection of works with her distinctive visual style and powerful use of sound through her short films, commercials and music videos for the MET, the Whitney, Gucci, Frieze, as well as artists such as Beyoncé, Rage Against the Machine, Kamasi Washington and Neneh Cherry amongst others. She is the 2021 Grammy Award Winner for Best Music Video for her direction on Brown Skin Girl by Beyonce. She is, additionally the winner of a CICLOPE, Soul Train, Cannes Lion and NAACP award for the same video. Her latest piece, OUT / SIDE OF TIME, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is currently on show as part of their exhibition: Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.
TAYLOR RENEE ALDRIDGE (Moderator LA Screening)
Curator and writer Taylor Renee Aldridge joined the California African American Museum (CAAM) in August 2020. Her first project at CAAM was Enunciated Life, a contemporary art exhibition in which Black spiritual beliefs—as well as the movements, sounds, and other bodily expressions that have engendered communication within and beyond Black churches—operate as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender. Aldridge has organized critically acclaimed exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artists Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and The Luminary (St. Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an influential journal of art criticism for Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Canadian Art, Contemporary And, Detroit Metro Times, Hyperallergic, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She holds an M.L.A. from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and B.A. from Howard University with a concentration in Art History
ruth gebreyesus (Moderator SF Screening)
ruth gebreyesus writes, edits, & produces work centering cultural production and power.
VOL. 1
These films challenge us to consider how the performance of intimate rituals addresses a legacy of racial trauma. Celebration and mourning coexist as individuals devise strategies to mask or confront their pain through color or lack thereof.
Co-presented by Film at REDCAT
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T
Keisha Rae Witherspoon / United States, 14 min., 2019
A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R.I.P. t-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.
Keisha Rae Witherspoon is an independent filmmaker currently based in South Florida. Her work is driven by interests in science, speculative fiction, and fantasy, as well as documenting the unseen and unheralded nuances of diasporic peoples. She is creative director and co-founder of Third Horizon, a Caribbean artist collective responsible for Papa Machete, which had its U.S. premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Recovery
Kevin Jerome Everson / United States, 10:19 min., 2020
Recovery is about an Airman training to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base, 14th Flying Training Wing, in Columbus, Mississippi. The film made its world premiere at Berlinale Forum Expanded. With A1C Xavier Payton, Ssgt. Nazareth Oliver (voice).
Kevin Jerome Everson MFA, Ohio University. BFA, University of Akron. Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson was awarded the 2020 Berlin Prize; the 24th Heinz Award in Art and Humanities and was the 2012 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video; his films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at Courtisane/Cinematek Brussels; Cinema du Reel; Glasgow Shorts; Harvard Film Archive; Tate Modern; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; Visions du Reel; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Centre Pompidou. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial and the 2018 Carnegie International. Everson’s artwork—including photographs, sculptures, and award-winning films, including ten features and over 160 short form works—have been exhibited internationally at film festivals, cinemas, galleries, museums and public and private art institutions.
Untitled
Bradford Young / United States, 3 min., 2019
A memorial to slain rapper, Nipsey Hussle, a meditation on the cathartic nature of collective mourning in the African diaspora.
Bradford Young is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. He was the first African-American cinematographer to be nominated for an Academy Award for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival in 2017. In 2015, he had been awarded the BET Best Movie Award for his cinematographic work on Ava DuVernay’s Selma. He has won Cinematography Awards at the Sundance Film Festival twice: in 2011 for Dee Ree’s Pariah; then in 2013 for Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George and David Lowery’s Ain't Them Bodies Saints. He also shot Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), James Spooner’s White Lies, Black Sheep (2007), Dosunmu’s Restless City (2011), and DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere (2012). He was the cinematographer for DuVernay’s 2019 Netflix series, When They See Us. Young studied film at Howard University. He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
blu blak
by King Ali Emeka / United States, 20 min., 2019
19-year-old writer-director King Ali Emeka explores the pitfalls of contemporary black masculinity against the backdrop of L.A.'s fast and youthful skating scene. Emeka portrays the central character of Malcom, a disturbed and paranoid young skater, who navigates through a fever dream fueled by drugs and memories of past devastations.
King Ali Emeka is a director and writer. He recently graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in film studies. As a filmmaker, his work focuses on coming-of-age stories, often shaped around Black and brown youth grappling with the complexities of adolescence. His work has screened at BlackStar Film Festival, winning the juried award for Best Youth Short in 2018. His work has also screened in college classrooms for film studies, such as University of California, Santa Barbara. When he is not busy working on new film projects, Emeka records, mixes, and masters his own music, garnering over 1 million streams with his pop records on Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music.
Alone
Garrett Bradley / United States, 12 min., 2017
What would it mean to marry someone behind bars?
Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, southern culture, and the history of film in the United States. Bradley has received numerous prizes which include the 2019 Prix de Rome and the 2017 Sundance Jury Prize for the short film Alone, which was released by The New York Times OpDocs, and became an Oscar Contender for short nonfiction filmmaking. In December 2019, Bradley's first solo exhibition opened at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), curated by Rebecca Matalon. In January of 2020, Bradley became the first Black American woman to receive Best Director in the US Documentary Section of the 2020 Sundance Film festival for her first feature length documentary, Time.
Black Mary
Kahlil Joseph / United States, 6 min., 2017
A Tate commissioned short film inspired by the work of Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava.
Kahlil Joseph is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker best known for his large-scale video installations. His most recent work, BLKNWS, a two channel fugitive newscast that blurs the lines between art, journalism, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique, made its international debut in the 58th Venice Biennale earlier this year. Exploring the space between music video, short film and art installation, he has collaborated with artists such as Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs and Shabazz Palaces. He was Emmy and Grammy nominated for his direction of Beyonce’s feature length album film, Lemonade. He currently serves as the artistic director of The Underground Museum, a pioneering independent art museum, exhibition space and community hub in Los Angeles that he co-founded with his late brother, artist and curator, Noah Davis.
PATTAKI
Everlane Moraes / Cuba, 21 min., 2018
In the dense night, when the moon lifts the tide, beings trapped in the daily life of water scarcity, they are hypnotized by the powers of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea.
Everlane Moraes graduated in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil, and studied Documentary Direction at the Film and TV School - EICTV, Cuba. She is a member of the Association of Black Film Professionals (A.P.A.N), an entity that represents Afro Descendant filmmakers in Brazil. She was selected for the Director’s Summit in the 34th Talents Guadalajara in collaboration with Berlinale 2020, and recently, received a development award from the William Graves Fund. She makes films that move between fiction and documentary, creating a dialogue between philosophical concepts and the socio-cultural issues of the Black diaspora, working in a hybrid aesthetic between visual arts and cinema. A multiple award winner, she has shown her work internationally, in Latin America, Africa, the USA, Russia and Europe.